


The Best Way to a Man's Heart

by devilinthedetails



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Family, Gen, Meet the Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:40:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21894538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Beru meets Cliegg and Shmi.
Relationships: Cliegg Lars/Shmi Skywalker, Owen Lars/Beru Whitesun
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	The Best Way to a Man's Heart

The Best Way to a Man's Heart

Beru shaded her eyes with a cupped palm and kept them fixed on the arid landscape that surrounded her family’s moisture farm for kilometers. She was watching for the first signs of Owen’s approaching speeder bike even though she didn’t need to do so. The emptiness of Tatooine’s sand dunes meant that she would notice an incoming speeder bike long before it arrived on the Whitesun homestead even if she wasn’t looking for it. She just liked that first thrill of spotting a black blob on the horizon, knowing it was Owen coming to fetch her, and beholding every stage of his transition into a recognizable figure touching down outside her family’s home.

As if her thoughts had summoned him, she glimpsed a dark blur in front of Tatooine’s twin suns. Her cheeks burned in a way that had nothing to do with the scorching rays of the suns as Owen’s form–attached to the speeder bike he had saved a season’s worth of the money his father paid him for helping with the harvest to purchase with spine-straightening pride in Mos Eisley–came into view. By the time he landed in the small sandstorm his speeder bike created, she was beaming like a sun herself.

“Hop on.” Owen, never one to waste time with affectionate greetings, patted the seat behind him.

Beru checked that the handle of insulating durasteel container in which she was keeping a fresh batch of her blue milk cheese cool was secured around her elbow before climbing onto the speeder bike behind Owen. Wrapping her arms about Owen’s waist to ensure that she remained aboard the speeder bike while it was in flight, she pressed her cheek against the rough cloth covering Owen’s board shoulder and thought that this closeness to her boyfriend was what she loved most about sharing his speeder bike with him.

Unfortunately, the time she had taken to confirm that the durasteel container was secured about her elbow had given her family a chance to shout their farewell taunts and admonitions.

“Ooh, off with your boyfriend, Beru!” chirped her little Dama, who was still at the age where she would scream and swipe away the slime of any kiss a boy dared to plant on her cheek.

“Gross!” her younger brother Haro added, sticking out his tongue.

“Your tongue will get stuck like that if you don’t watch out.” Beru waggled her finger at Haro, who ignored her.

“Be back before sunset!” Her mother, hunched over a vaporator to collect mushrooms, stood up to call before Owen could swoop away from the homestead. “That’s when the Tusken Raiders come out to prey on helpless settlers.”

“Yes, Mom!” Beru raised her voice so her assent could be heard by her mother even if she believed she was too old to need reminding of the perils vicious Tusken Raiders posed to the hapless settlers they delighted in torturing and slaughtering.

“Make sure my daughter gets home safely.” Beru’s father twisted away from calibrating a vaporator long enough to stare sternly at Owen as the speeder bike took off, stirring up another small sandstorm. “Don’t crash that thing with her on it!”

“I’d never be so careless,” Owen promised as he sped away from the farm and Beru’s pestering family.

“Dad embarrasses me so.” Beru shook her head, cheek scratching against the rough fabric of Owen’s tunic.

“He just wants to protect you.” Owen emitted a sound that hovered between a grunt and a laugh, a noise only she would understand indicated amusement. “He doesn’t want me getting you killed! He thinks I’m a dangerous risk-taker because I ride a speeder bike!”

The idea of reliable, staid Owen being anyone’s notion of a risk-taker was so ridiculous that Beru couldn’t stifle a giggle. She wanted to shout a teasing comment back at Owen, but she knew that the wind would just blow away the words the screaming engine didn’t swallow. Instead she reveled in the wind rippling through the braids coiled atop her head and slapping life into her cheeks. She never felt so alive and so free as when she rode behind Owen on his speeder bike. Everything moved so fast on a speeder bike that even Tatooine’s stark landscape became somehow beautiful in its sharpness, and with the wind on her face, the sun reflected off the endless sand somehow became pleasingly warm rather than mercilessly hot.

All too soon, the freedom of the speeder bike ride ended as Owen guided the vehicle to a landing outside the Lars homestead. Beru, who had never visited her boyfriend’s farm before, politely murmured her admiration of the fairly standard construction of the domed buildings that comprised the Lars homestead, hoping that the compliments would mask how nervous she felt at meeting his father and the stepmother he considered a mother.

“What’s wrong?” Owen’s forehead furrowed as if he sensed the anxiety behind her pleasantries.

“What if your family doesn’t care for me?” Beru bit her lip.

“Then I shall tell them exactly how wrong they are and how little their opinions matter to me compared to you.” Owen slipped an arm around her waist and tugged her to his chest, brushing a kiss over the coils of her hair.

“So this is the girl who has stolen my son’s heart and dragged him away from his work on countless occasions?” A man who looked like an older version of Owen stepped out into the sunlight with this gruff greeting.

As Beru gazed at the man her boyfriend would become in the future, a second, more feminine figure followed him, scolding, “That’s no way to welcome a guest to our homestead, Cliegg.”

“Right you are, my dear.” Cliegg accepted the admonishment with a crooked smile. “I’m Cliegg, and this is my better half, Shmi Skywalker.”

“Pleasure to meet you both.” Beru hoped Cliegg and Shmi wouldn’t feel the blood pounding in her veins as she shook each of their hands in turn. “I’m Beru Whitesun.”

“No need to introduce yourself.” Shmi’s smile soothed Beru’s racing heart. “We’ve heard so much about you from Owen that we feel as if we know you even though we’ve just met. That’s why Cliegg has already forgotten his manners with you. Do come inside.”

Shmi steered them out of the sun into a domed dining room, where Beru praised the pattern painted onto the ceiling.

Shmi poured glasses of refreshingly cold juma juice for each of them and overrode Beru’s offer of assistance with a firm insistence that she was a guest who must be waited upon, but didn’t refuse the blue milk cheese Beru placed on the table.

“This is the best blue milk cheese I’ve ever tasted.” Cliegg whistled his approval of the slice of cheese he had just eaten. Eyes twinkling at Shmi, he went on, “No insult to my dear wife intended, of course.”

“None taken.” Shmi spoke between bites of her own slice of cheese. “This is the best blue milk cheese I’ve ever tasted as well.”

“Must have been the blue milk cheese that stole my son’s heart.” Cliegg claimed a second slice of cheese, which he chomped into with enthusiasm. “Certainly could steal any man’s since we all know the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”


End file.
